SEVEN
Biden continued deliberating whether to run. In early 2019, he invited Anita Dunn, a veteran of the Obama White House and managing director at SKDK, a political and communications firm in Washington, to meet him at the estate he rented in the Virginia suburbs.
Dunn—married to Bob Bauer, who had served as Obama’s White House counsel—was a defender of the party’s centrist wing. She considered herself a proud liberal, but she was not in lockstep with the progressives who were increasingly gaining power after Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont built a movement with his 2016 primary campaign against Clinton.
Sanders and his supporters defined their politics as “progressive” and to the left of “liberal.” The term “progressive” carries an anti-establishment and anti-corporate protest spirit—and a more forceful, left-wing approach to economic and cultural issues. Progressives often embraced ideas such as “Medicare for All” and wealth taxes, although the label lacked a specific credo.
At 61, Dunn was in the same age range as Donilon and Ricchetti and had gotten her start in presidential politics inside Jimmy Carter’s White House. Dunn was known as formidable, opinionated, tough, and smart.
Dunn had one central message for Biden: The Democratic Party is significantly misreading the 2018 midterms if it thinks the party regained control because a progressive wave is sweeping the country.
While a 28-year-old democratic socialist, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had upset a House Democratic leader in a primary and other Sanders allies were making inroads, there is no such wave, Dunn said.
Pay attention to Biden-type Democrats who had won, she said. She pointed to Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operations officer, and others who had won back long-held Republican seats.
Biden expressed hesitation. Am I too late? Will the campaign talent really be there? He was careful and nervous, no doubt remembering how much of the Obama staff had flocked to Clinton in 2015.
I’ll support you if you run, Dunn told him. Biden had one clear advantage: Most candidates struggle with the message. In his case, he was the message.
But Biden’s lack of direction troubled Dunn. He was notoriously slow to make decisions, and he was not building the operation he would need to start the race in a position of strength. No one appeared to be empowered to offer people jobs, and he seemed uncomfortable asking people to sign up for a maybe campaign.
She concluded that if an alternative, standout candidate emerged who Biden thought could beat Trump, he might not run.
In early March, Biden summoned Ron Klain, who had served as chief of staff in the vice president’s office during the first two years of the first term.
“Come up and talk to me about the campaign,” Biden said.
Klain, 55, with wavy dark hair, had the persona of a university president who had spent years on the faculty. Comfortable with power, but even more comfortable in the policy weeds. Easygoing and social, but sharp-elbowed if anyone tried to scramble his agenda.
Klain had entered Biden’s orbit more than two decades earlier, serving as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden was chairman. He was one of Biden’s Ivy League high achievers—magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, editor of the Law Review, and Supreme Court law clerk to Justice Byron White.
He also was keenly attuned to the Washington pecking order and Biden. He once candidly noted, “Joe Biden ran for president in 2008. And you do not run for president if you don’t think you could be president, right? Obviously, 99 percent of Democrats thought someone else should be president, but he thought he should be president. And you bring that with you when you become vice president.”
Klain had backed Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016 when Biden took too long to decide, and the break had been painful for both men.
“It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,” Klain wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in October 2015, a week before Biden announced he would not run. “I am definitely dead to them—but I’m glad to be on Team HRC.” The email was part of a trove of Podesta exchanges hacked by Russians.
Klain, who was working for an investment firm run by AOL founder Steve Case, hopped in his car at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and drove the two hours to Wilmington.
A couple hours analyzing Biden’s alternatives would be a high-road, intellectual-political exercise, catnip to Klain, who belonged to that semipermanent club of politicos in Washington who went into the private sector but leapt at the chance to return to presidential politics.
“I just feel like I have to do this,” Biden said as they sat down. “Trump represents something fundamentally different and wrong about politics.”
Biden’s next words would stick forever with Klain: “This guy just isn’t really an American president.”
Biden’s certainty surprised Klain. He had anticipated Biden’s usual exhausting back-and-forth, picking at the pluses and minuses of important decisions.
Klain was also struck by how different this Biden sounded from the Biden of that first presidential run back in the late 1980s. Then, conversations centered on gaming what kind of candidate could win. The theory was that Biden, then at age 44, was the right generation. He had the look, and National Journal had put him on its cover as a Kennedyesque figure, a significant accolade at the time.
The calculus in 1988 was all politics—the marketing department’s version of what it would take to win the White House. It was a disaster.
Now, Klain felt differently. This was not a political conversation. It was to fix what Trump broke, a mission. They did not talk about the states Biden could win, the blue Democratic wall or the Electoral College.
Others running were saying the country needed to turn the page from Trump. Biden said he was going to talk about Trump regularly, perhaps endlessly.
“This is going to be brutal on your family,” Klain told him. “The one thing about Trump is there will be no rules. He will throw every lie, every harsh thing, every mean thing he can at you and your family.”
Some of the dark side of Hunter had already made it into the press: alcohol and addiction, messy foreign finances, a relationship with Beau’s widow, massive credit card and tax debts. His former wife, Kathleen, had accused him of squandering their finances on drugs and other women.
Klain pressed. “Is your family really ready for what’s coming?” It was a delicate nod to those Hunter issues.
Yes, Biden insisted. They understood.
“Are you ready for what’s coming?” Klain asked. “This isn’t like any campaign you have ever run before.”
When Biden was on the ticket in 2008, he and Senator John McCain, then the Republican nominee, would have off-the-record, back-channel exchanges to smooth the waters.
“There’s going to be no phone calls here,” Klain said. “This is going to be a battle to the death. Nothing off-limits. Trump will use every possible tool, legitimate and illegitimate, fair and unfair, true and false to try to destroy you and your family.”
Biden was dug in. He had crossed the decision line. He was running.
Time was running out on a formal announcement. Top campaign hands had gone to work for Senator Harris and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, whose progressive credentials made her a force. Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana—gay and a veteran and a Rhodes Scholar—was drawing rave reviews. Biden was being privately dismissed by some donors and rivals as the past.
After about 4 p.m., after talking for six hours, Biden and Klain were done.
“I will win,” Biden told Klain.